Sic Semper Erat

The Three Orders

The Three Orders

Medieval society is built around a caste system that divides the people into one of three orders: those who work, those who pray, and those who fight. The notion that all men are created equal is a strange one to the medieval mind. God put you in the caste where you belong, and those who rule over you do so by God’s will because He made them better than you. Even in the present of our story, when the growing cities and towns are beginning to challenge this order by creating a new class of merchants and burghers, the caste system asserts itself in powerful ways to curb this trend and maintain its dominance.

Examples of…

Invoking: You invoke your status to command obedience from someone of a lower class.

Enduring: You try to rally the peasants to rise up against the evil baron.

Compelling: You must accept the lot that God has given you in the world.

Declaring: You pass a peasant locked in the stocks for failing to kneel before a passing lord.

Substituting: You can’t use this aspect to substitute for a skill, though the GM might use it to set a dynamic difficulty in some specific circumstances.